Category: horror fiction

This summer has been my most productive, writing-wise, in several years. It’s like the taps were turned on again and I’ve been writing with all my focus and concentration, feeling the juices flowing again.

Two, count ’em, two long stories since June, quite a few poems, a short prose piece that’s one of the best things I’ve written in quite awhile…

And everything registering strongly on the aesthetic Richter Scale—nothing slight or inconsequential. Intelligent, literate efforts, not pandering to any school or taste.

I haven’t lost a fucking step.

Oh, and I’ve started work on a new novel. Well, not quite a new novel—I’m completely overhauling a 250-page manuscript I originally conceived around 2002. If I had to guess, I’d say I’m looking at 12-15 months worth of revisions, so you shouldn’t expect to see that one in print until, ballparking it, mid-2019. No teasers, except that it references a classic Victorian thriller and will be darker and more horror-related than some of my recent work.

But fear not, impatient readers, I shall be releasing not one but two full-length efforts in 2018: first, The Algebra of Inequality and Other Poems, a selection of verse culled from the past five years. The title is nicked from a line in a Don Barthelme short story that caught my eye. Ol’ Don had some zingers.

I know poetry is a hard sell to some folks but I believe it gives me the opportunity to address profound philosophical and spiritual and existential questions in the most spare, personal, unforgiving literary format. Poetry permits no artistic missteps—it really is like walking a tightrope.

And there will be (drumroll please) a new short story collection next year, Electric Castles: A Book of Urban Legends. Original tales, all centered around everything magical and terrifying about cities, near and far, real and imagined. Killer stories, spanning just about every genre, guaranteed to amaze, disturb and warp your puny perceptions and sensibilities. Consensual reality? What the hell is that?

Both books will feature, as per the custom here at Black Dog Press, gorgeous cover art and will be professionally formatted and bound. There will be an e-book version of Electric Castles, still mulling it over re: the poetry. Poetry is so unique and personal and analog…does it really belong on a tablet or phone screen?

Lots of writing and revisions in the months ahead, some highs and lows, good days and days when, as they say, “the bear gets you”. All part of the creative process: painful and terrifying, but also exhilarating and inspiring. No doubt you’ll be reading something of my triumphs and travails here…and I hope it will serve to remind you that the writing life is not easy and requires a great deal of courage and fortitude. Perseverance and sheer guts get you a lot further in any profession than mere talent. Surely you know that by now.

Some mornings I can’t imagine facing that page again.

And yet I do.

That’s the difference between an author and a poser.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: for real writers, girls and boys, every fucking month is “National Novel Writing Month”.

About twenty-five years ago, I wrote a short essay on the life and work of Charles Beaumont that was eventually published in a small press magazine in Florida.

Since that one-time appearance, that essay has sat in my archives, gathering dust. I thought it was high time I dug it out, polished it up and posted it on Beautiful Desolation.

Beaumont had enormous influence on my early writing. He and Richard Matheson were my guys, the ones who felt (like I do) that horror/suspense is at its best when it tells small, intimate, gripping, intense, human stories.

In the case of both authors, many of the tales they wrote in the 1950s, long before Twilight Zone was even a gleam in Rod Serling’s eye, exhibited all the best qualities of classic TZ episodes: brevity, satire, empathy and bloody great twist endings.

I don’t want to steal any thunder from my essay—click on the link below and it will take you directly to the PDF, which I make available, like everything else on this site, at absolutely no cost. Just one of the perqs you collect for hanging out here in my odd little literary salon.

Three boxes, containing 70 copies of Righteous Blood, have arrived and I’ve already commenced signing books, filling orders, stuffing padded envelopes…and will lug the first load to the post office later this afternoon. The staff there have come to know me well over the years. I think of it as my patriotic duty: helping keep Canada Post solvent (and preventing it from falling into private ownership).

You can get Righteous Blood from me, or save on shipping by ordering it through your favourite indie bookstore or, I suppose if you have to, from an on-line retailer (Kindle and ePub versions are also available).

This one’s a page-turner, or maybe a throat-grabber is more accurate.

A truly terrifying book and my wife’s favourite of all my titles.

Which only goes to show, even the nicest, kindest people can have a dark side…

Exciting times. Like an expectant father, pacing about the waiting room.

In the meantime, I spent part of my afternoon devising a promotional flier for the book—then Sherron comes home from work, does a little creative re-arranging and suddenly the flier’s looking pretty darn good.

This will go out with review copies and also to specialty or genre stores that might be willing to stock my book:

As the flier indicates, e-book and Kindle versions of RIGHTEOUS BLOOD are already available.

For some reason, I resisted doing what I’d done on previous occasions: go on-line, to a site like RedBubble (or some place similar), tap in “dark fantasy art” as my search term and see what came up.

For So Dark the Night I must have looked through over a thousand images. Easily.

Not only was the effort of actually finding art to match the mood and message of Righteous Blood daunting, if I did manage to identify an illo that appealed to me I’d have to locate the artist (not always easy), secure their permission to use their art for a reasonable fee (ditto) and then, y’know, come up with the money for the transaction.

Earlier this spring I needed a break from writing, retreated to my basement dungeon where I like to paint and shoot my strange, short films, and slopped away happily on a couple of canvases. Both pieces turned out well, but my favourite was inspired by apocalyptic thinking: global warming, the massive wild fires that have raged around the world due to drought conditions and human tampering. I titled it “Red Skies” and quickly recognized how it might be the answer to my cover art woes.

(Click on images to enlarge)

Mark Rothko was definitely an influence, wouldn’t you say?

I sent a Jpg of “Red Skies” to Black Dog Press’s longtime cover designer Chris Kent last week, told him to use it as source material but not feel slavishly bound to the original. We had to be careful with other people’s artistic efforts but I wanted to give him permission to play with the image to his heart’s content.

Chris is a full-time teacher, a husband and father, an athlete constantly in training…but he also has an artistic side that he loves to indulge, a passion for design and art that’s very much a holdover from childhood.

Over the next few days, he tinkered with my painting, spitballing me a few initial notions like this one:

Cool, eh?

But I got a sense these first salvos were sort of tentative, Chris not sure how much license he had to tamper with my work.

But then, with his next flash of inspiration, he abandoned all fealty to the original and just fucking went for it. I opened up the file he sent, sat back and gaped at the shattered, fractured version of “Red Skies” that now graced the cover.

And went absolutely mental over it.

Sent him a few minor suggestions, nothing of any great import, he went away did some more polishing and then delivered the final version. His masterpiece.

ABOUT CLIFF BURNS:

I have been an independent author and publisher for thirty years. I've written eleven books (novels, short story collections & poetry), including DISLOYAL SON, SO DARK THE NIGHT and SEX & OTHER ACTS OF THE IMAGINATION. In the past three decades over one hundred of my tales have appeared in anthologies and publications around the world.